


of an inward agony

by impertinences



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-03
Updated: 2018-07-03
Packaged: 2019-06-04 17:32:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15152186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impertinences/pseuds/impertinences
Summary: Vanessa does not yet know: there is no door that can keep out the devil.





	of an inward agony

**Author's Note:**

> \- Title comes from a Tennyson poem.  
> \- I have no excuse for completely diverging from the canon here. To justify what follows, nobody that I know of was happy with the third season anyway, so what more damage could I possibly do? My story interrupts the ending of season 2 and gallops away into fantasy from there.  
> \- My goal is to add to this in chapters since this piece itself became, unintentionally, a prologue of sorts.

“There are things within us all that can never be released …  
we could cease to be, and another would exist in our place.” – Vanessa Ives

“There are things you can’t control; there are battles you lose.” – Ethan Chandler

“You have been given a great power. One day you will use it and take your foretold place  
over these mortal animals … And when you’re ready, I will serve you best of all.” – Hecate Poole

 

It is dusk when Hecate arrives. Dusk. The time of day when a person can straddle the earthly and spiritual realms, souls precariously caught half in one world, half in another. She comes carried on the wind, the way wicked things often do, the way fate always does. She comes on the last day in October, when the doors between the worlds are open and terrible, wondrous things are accomplished. She comes with her mother’s grimoire in her hand and the devil’s language on her tongue.

She comes when Grandage Place is at its weakest and most barren. Sir Malcom has departed for Africa in search of his son’s bones and a final resting place for his own guilt while, elsewhere, the young doctor pollutes his blood with opiates, numbing his heartbreak and remorse. Victor bolts himself behind his dripping laboratory doors, preferring the dank air and the dark shadows and what little comfort he can coerce from cold corpses. Sembene’s blood still dries on the stones of a witch’s house, his spirit left to soar home. Ethan has his curse and his father’s bounty and his self-imposed guilt; all his chains have nearly caught up to him, are circling his wrists and ankles and neck. Vanessa, too, has felt a tightening around her neck, as life-altering as the knot from a hangman’s noose. Her cards have whispered beneath her fingers, sticky with spider silk when she turns them over. A bad omen.

On the fourth night of the week, too full of dread to be idle, she casts a bloody scorpion on the floors of her bedroom and lights white candles for protection; Ethan responds in kind, burning sage in the doorways and by the windowsills. He must leave, but he can’t bring himself to abandon her to the possibility of a new threat, not when the wounds inflicted by Evelyn and her coven are still so fresh and consuming.

“What is it?” he asks once he’s covered the last of the mirrors with a pale sheet and made his way into the drawing room. Vanessa stands by the window, pulling aside the curtain to watch the street. He hands her a cup of strong tea sweetened with honey, the last batch brewed from Sembene’s loose African leaves.

Vanessa shakes her head, cupping the tea between her palms for warmth, and watches the horizon where shades of violet and blue battle with oranges and reds. After a moment, she says, “Best to stay alert tonight, I think.”

Ethan tends to the fire. His mind is full of the future – the shame of abandonment, the grief of loss, the resentment of family. He has already made up his mind to turn himself in to Scotland Yard, and he’s aware of each passing hour signaled by the chime of Malcolm’s grand mahogany clock. In contrast, Vanessa cannot stop thinking of the past – the exhaustion of running from herself, from others, from serpentine desires. She thinks of Evelyn Poole’s dark magic and the stench of that house, surrounded in death, and Ethan’s bestial face, red with blood in the glow of so many candles. Although she had vanquished and repelled the demon when he beckoned from the mouth of a porcelain doll, she feels a loosening in her spirit all the same, as though she’s been worn into a husk on the inside. As dry and brittle as kindling. She does not know what awaits her, what awaits any of them now. She can’t unknot the threads of their narratives any more than she can alter what has already come to pass. So she sits on the sofa and hopes, trying to calm the mounting dread in her chest.

Vanessa does not yet know: there is no door that can keep out the devil.

 

 

 

 

 

There’s a wolf on the stairs, his fur a stark shining steel. The moon is high, and the wolf stretches his neck to howl. A sound as clean and somber as any night creature’s call. A dense fog crawls across the city streets and sweeps under the doors at Grandage, blanketing the plush carpets and gleaming wooden floors. Outside, beyond the walls of the London house, Vanessa can hear what sounds like a thousand clinking chains, the crash of ocean waves, distant, melodious cries of pain or pleasure. There’s a whisper of bat wings and, further off still, something terrible and hideous stirs within the darkness, slithering forward, patient and persistent and looming. Inside, the wolf continues to howl.

Vanessa wants to go to the wolf, to bury her head into its soft pelt, but a shivering, shimmering movement by the fire catches her eye.

 _They will hunt you until the end of days._ The Cut-Wife of Ballentree Moor tells her, throwing a fistfull of salt into a cast iron pot that hangs and steams above the fire. Her mouth doesn’t move; her lips are pink and scalded. She’s sticky with tar, the black of it clinging to her eyes, streaking down her throat. Her scalp is covered in blisters, shorn of hair by flame. _Be true._

Rather than dread, Vanessa is disgusted, then, surprised by that disgust. She fights the urge to recoil from the specter of her old friend. At the same time, Vanessa feels the burn on her back begin to itch.  The wolf howls again.

When Vanessa turns her head to the sound, looking for comfort and clarity, she sees that there’s a woman in the wallpaper, stretching the pattern, contorting the shapes. The woman claws herself free, the wallpaper shredding at her feet in long strips the color of old skin and yellow teeth. Hecate’s scarred body glows as though freshly branded. A great flurry of batwings sounds in the air when her feet touch the fog. She wears a smile that is both sly and intimidating, one hand stretching out, her hands curled in the anticipation of latching onto Vanessa’s hair.

Vanessa lurches from the sofa.

The dream lifts from her unkindly. She does not remember when she closed her eyes, when she fell asleep, but she knows an omen when she sees one. Her mind feels as those its been wrapped in cobwebs.

The mahogany clock chimes.

Slowly, Vanessa turns her head. She’s not surprised to see Hecate near the fire, standing where the Cut-Wife had, her dark hair curling and loose around her shoulders, her true form hidden behind the guise of a young woman. She smells of freshly poured iron. It is the smell of hellfire and danger and blood.

Vanessa can’t find her voice. “Leave,” she whispers, feeling ice run down her spine and spread shivers across her skin. She places a hand on the arm of the sofa to steady herself, an unusual burst of thunder slicing through her temples. It feels not unlike the hold the Cut-Wife used on her outside of the witch’s ramshackle cottage in the moors. Beside her, slumped against a chair near the window, Ethan sleeps, undisturbed and unmoved.

“Now, now. Is that any way to greet a sister?” Hecate asks with the same sly smile she’d worn in the dream, only this time she pairs it with open arms, a gesture of goodwill.  

Vanessa closes her eyes. She feels the cold slide of scales against each knot of her vertebrae. “I had a sister once. She died. By what right do you call me the same?”

“By blood right, of course.”

“What do you mean?” When Vanessa can open them, her gaze has trouble focusing on the witch.

“Daywalker or Nightcomer, it matters not. You were born with the gift. I was forced upon it. Still, the same power runs in our veins now, the same chance for opportunity.”

“I am nothing like you.”

“For now,” Hecate says. “But you languish under the terrible burden of destiny. As does your Mr. Chandler.” She gives a brief nod towards Ethan’s sleeping form, his long limbs hardly contained by the chair, his chin resting on his chest.

“Leave,” Vanessa says again, trying to shake the paralysis that has overcome her.

But Hecate isn’t even there. She’s stepping into the fire, letting the flames catch her dress, lick her fingers, envelop her body, until she is flame and only flame and then she’s nothing, not even smoke or ash.

For the second time, Vanessa wakes with a start.

 

 

 

 

 

“What magic there is, is inside her,” Hecate tells Ethan. “What delights would be possible then, I wonder, should Ms. Ives choose to unleash herself? Should you both?”

Hecate has her arms around Ethan’s neck, her body pressed against his front, her fingers in his hair, tangled at the root. She smells overwhelmingly of nightshade and pepper and sea current. She presses her mouth to his throat, right against his jugular where she can feel the beat of his pulse, leaving a wet smear that stings.

Ethan’s hands dip and crawl across her narrow waist, bridging over her hips, circling back up her spine. He knows this is not her - not in her true form - but he finds himself admiring the gleam of the firelight in her dark curls and the way the scarab beetles glitter as they crawl across her shoulders, disappearing into her nest of hair. When she smiles up at him, he thinks he can see the fine points of her teeth.

“Where are we?” he asks, his voice muddled, sluggish. He doesn’t feel like himself at all. He can’t remember where he is or even quite _who_ he is, but he can feel a terrible urge inside of him, a desperate clawing sensation.

“Don’t you know? Don’t you recognize it?”

Hecate unwraps herself from him and steps away, towards a broken table, where she runs her fingers through blood as fresh as lamb slaughter. A beetle scurries down the length of her arm and tucks itself back inside the fold of her sleeve, the velvet wrinkling as it climbs upward.

Now that Hecate isn’t against him, Ethan can make out the room:  the overturned tables, the broken bottles, the ripped bodies, the smashed chairs, the stink of the Thames not nearly heavy enough to block out the stench of coppery blood. His surroundings come into focus slowly, like a shadow, crisp and sharp, delineated against rough wood. He’s back at the Mariner’s Inn, in the center of a massacre. Only this time, Brona sits on the top of the stairs that lead to the lodging rooms. One of those rooms was theirs once. Ethan can still remember the smell of their bedsheets and how, towards the end, her sick scent had overcome the smell of river water and honeysuckles. There’s blood on the corner of her mouth, and she’s ghostly pale. She wears a sad smile, watching him from above. She looks like herself, like how Ethan remembers her, and yet she doesn’t.

 _Remember,_ she tells Ethan, blood spilling against her mouth when she tries to talk, _you like things to be as they are._

Hecate glances at Brona the way one does a fly. Her mouth crinkles into a sneer. She pushes her palm flat into the pool of blood on the table, and Ethan feels an unexpected hunger twist his gut. He clutches his hands to his head - the bones beneath his skin are beginning to crack and shift.

“No,” he growls, but he’s not sure to whom.

Hecate draws her fingers through the blood, creating a shape Ethan cannot decipher. He has to focus very hard to hear her over the storm of his own pulse. “As I told Ms. Ives, you languish under the terrible burden of destiny, Mr. Chandler.”

From the stairs, Brona shakes her head, her copper hair dull against the ethereal whiteness of her skin. _Will you love what she becomes? Like you loved me?_

Ethan turns on his heel to look at Hecate, his eyes red-rimmed, his hands balling into fists by his side. “What do you mean? What sort of spell is this?”

“There is greatness in us all,” Hecate whispers, a beetle darting across her neck, its skeletal legs tapping hurriedly over her collarbone. “Imagine what we would accomplish if we circumvented destiny. If we were set free.” Her eyes are hellishly bright, but there’s a darkness at the center of them that is dense.

“What?” Ethan says again, his voice pitching towards a yell. His heart is thundering, and there’s a bestial roar rising from inside of his chest, battling with his throat. Hecate’s body is swimming, blinking in and out of existence, and he cannot find Brona on the steps, cannot hear her voice.

A thousand scales slither in the darkness, and Ethan startles awake, nearly pitching himself out of his chair.

Vanessa is by the window in the drawing room. She turns her head over her shoulder to look at him, his disheveled hair, the color high in his face, his hands shaking.

“We’ve had a visitor,” she says, and the mahogany clock chimes.

  
  
  


Vanessa is sacrosanct. Struck by the backhand of God, by her own transgression, her own desire. She has spent the better half of life denying and caging the most inner part of her, the pieces of her soul that may not be entirely her own, the bits of her that are surrounded in mystery and fate and lore. She can see so clearly all the steps that have taken her to this moment, all the puzzle pieces that have been moved by her own hand. She has always known that the path her life may take hangs on one of two choices: to resist or to submit. And yet …

“Hecate,” she says, breaking the silence in the drawing room, her tea cold on the table, the fire smoldering low in the hearth. “You dreamed of her too.”

“It felt - ”

“Yes, real, I know. Dream magic is linked to blood magic, and so it is dangerous for both parties involved. She is connected to us now, to our subconscious. She may enter our dreams as she sees fit.”

“How is such a thing possible?” Ethan asks, coming to sit beside Vanessa. He does not doubt her - he knows her too well for that by now - but he is frustrated by that world which is always just out of his grasp, looming like dust in the wind.

“Dreams are personal,” Vanessa explains, holding her hands in her lap like a child. “They are worlds of thought, and in a world made of thought, anything is possible. Dreams are as powerful as history. Emotions are as real as gravity. Ideas become facts. Those in tune with the demimonde can cut the stitches between the real world and the thought world, can bring them together.”

“And there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves?”

Vanessa smiles, soft and full of guilt. “I am unsafe, and I have jeopardized your safety as well. I fear my destiny is to damage those foolish enough to surround me.”

Ethan takes her hand in the gentlest of ways, and she turns her smile to him, a sad smile that does not add any light to her eyes. He wants to tell her that he isn’t going anywhere, that her safety is paramount, that he has bound himself to her in some permanent fashion, but it’s only a half-truth. He has his own ghosts to exorcise, and he’s bound for America, for his father. His past has finally caught up to him, but she knows so little of what his past is that he says nothing, only skims his thumb across her knuckles.

“Sometimes I wonder …” Vanessa lets the thought hang between them, placing her hand above his. “There are things within us both. We cannot always control these forces. And yet …”

Ethan holds her eyes with his own. “Vanessa.” He says her name like a prayer, but it’s tinged with regret. He knows where this thought of hers is going.

“Should we?” she asks, letting her hand move from the top of his fingers to the side of his face, her fingers brushing the scratch of beard at his jaw. “Are you not tired of fighting? Do you not long to give in?”

“All I’ve known is war. In one sense or another. You hired me as a gun, remember? Fighting is what I do.”

“Still, we have a choice to make.”

"I'm with you." Ethan's ability to condense their problems into one simple, consistent focal point causes a stitch in Vanessa's heart to loosen. Here, again, he has made himself her anchor. 

“And Hecate?” she asks carefully, seeming to intuit the tension between Ethan and the witch. 

“Our choice will be hers, or so I fear.”

  
  
  


Ethan’s dreams are full of western sand and desert landscape. He hears rattlesnakes in the shadows, sees wolf prints in the sand, feels the rush of a cold wind against his face. In the bloody horizon of his dreamscapes, there’s the drums of the natives sounding the rhythm of his heart, and the war cries of the Appache. Sometimes there is so much blood that he wakes with the taste of it in his mouth.

Vanessa’s dreams are malleable, like the leather of a great winged beast, capable of folding her into a deep embrace. They stink of rot and old lace. She hears the scurry of insects, the hiss of primordial beasts, the breaking of glass, the stirring of dead leaves on wet cobblestone. Sometimes she can see nothing but darkness. Other times, she feels as though she is waltzing, holding a hand as cold as marble, her steps light and delicate, her dress whispering over hundreds of bones.

In the end, they shutter Grandage Place. The home becomes a shroud.

In the end, they return to the moors, to a wild, sad land.

  
  
  


The cottage is nearly the same as when they had left last, only a few months ago. The whole place looks skewed, knocked crooked, but persistent in its sturdiness. There’s a dead tree trunk in the yard, and the herb garden Ethan and Vanessa had painstakingly grown out by its roots has started to die, while the protective stones are too faded, too lacking in conviction, to do their job, but it is still the same. There’s a wet, rotten smell to the inside of the place, a smell of damp wood and old, singed earth. Vanessa is surprised by how little it bothers her and finds, instead, the scent to have a strange comfort to it. Primeval.

The little comfort the moors provide does not extend to her dreams, nor Ethan’s. They hold each other in the old, slim bed upstairs and dream of Hecate’s bloody grin, of the devil’s language, of great, howling beasts and night music that causes Vanessa to shudder and ache. When the moon erupts into a bloody orb, Ethan and Vanessa awake. Vanessa’s nails dig into Ethan’s shoulders, and his hands are heavy at her hips, clutching her in a way that is half desperate, half protective. They both must catch their breath.

It is Ethan that first notices the crack and glow of the fire below them.  

They descend the old stairs slowly, hand-in-hand, Ethan first, his body a tall shield. Vanessa keeps her free hand in the crook of his arm, feeling a sense of dejavu.

Hecate is by the fire. She minds a bubbling stew, the smell of roasting rabbit and salt managing to make Vanessa’s mouth water despite the absurdity of the moment. Hecate stirs once, twice, and a third time before lifting her head, her face splitting open into a smile that seems to shuck all the light from the flames. “It’s about time. You two sleep like the dead.”

Vanessa maneuvers around Ethan, her fingers trailing against his arm, her left hand still clutching his. She does not avert her eyes from the other woman while she moves to the low table near the fire, and its this silent confidence that keeps Ethan from retorting, from violently lashing out at the witch’s intrusion. She has spent weeks tormenting their dreams. Seeing her in the flesh, so brazenly assaulting this home as easily as she had assaulted Grandage Place, makes Ethan grit his teeth. His whole body is tipped as though to attack.

Crossing the short distance from the stairs to the table is like crossing the deck of a boat beginning to capsize. For all the strength her outward demeanor suggests, Vanessa feels her body wanting to drift to the right, then the left. She is not sure if she is still dreaming, if she is awake and hurtling through the remaining fog of some haunted dream, or if Hecate’s glittery fire and aromatic stew have more than one purpose. When she sits on the table bench, its worn wood familiar against her bones, she’s dismayed to feel herself continue to waver. Vanessa herself is the boat in danger of rolling over, sinking down into a churning darkness. It takes all her energy to sit straight, Ethan beside her, their hands still locked.

Vanessa exhales; it sounds curiously like a sob.

“I have just the thing,” Hecate says at the noise, as though they have long been friends and eased each other’s ailments. She spoons the stew into two clay mugs, carries them with her to the table, and sits one in front of them both. They steam. Vanessa smells earthen spices; Ethan smells blood. “One taste will set you right as rain.”

“This is ridiculous,” Ethan says, glaring. “Tell me why I shouldn’t break your neck right now.”

Hecate lifts her eyebrows and smiles, folding her hands on top of each other above the table. She looks smaller now that she isn’t in his dreams, now that she’s once again the picture of British propriety in her pinched skirt and velvet blouse, a thick, rich cloak of onyx settled over her shoulders.

“She wants us to make our choice,” Vanessa says slowly. She is thirsty. She wants to cup her hands around the mug and tip its warmth down her throat. “She wants me to reject the faith, once and for all. She doesn’t know I have already turned from it.”

“No,” Hecate says, turning her steely gaze to Vanessa. “You have lost it.”

“One is very much like another.”

“To lose one’s faith is far different than turning from it, than rebelling against it.”  

“Is that what you want from us?” Ethan asks, staring at the witch unkindly. He’s still holding Vanessa’s hand, and he can tell how her fingers have grown cold within his grasp. “A rebellion?”

“A liberation, Mr. Chandler,” Hecate clarifies, waving a finger in the air like a mother scolding an errant son. She looks to Vanessa. “You’re an intelligent woman. What do you know? That you will be hunted, that there is more than one great demon who seeks you, that your soul has been the landscape for an eternal war. How long can you fight? I do not want to change you, Ms. Ives. I want to unleash you. Both of you.”

Inside of her, unnoticed to the naked eye, parts of Vanessa begin to fit themselves together. She can feel herself reluctantly responding to Hecate’s vision. She grips Ethan’s hand in return, turning her face to the side. Her lips are dry and cracked, and she cannot remember ever being so thirsty.

Ethan takes her face between his two hands, softly, without force, and presses his forehead to hers. He can feel something stirring inside of him too. “If we make this choice,” he whispers, “we will be going forward into the unknown. For both of us.”

“Terra incognita,” Vanessa says, smiling in her slight, sad way.

When asked later, Vanessa will not be able to explain when they decided. She will only remember that they drank from their clay mugs and that the stew tasted of death.  

  
  
  


What Hecate offers them is a revolution, the chance to topple not God’s throne, but Lucifer’s. The mother of darkness and the wolf of God, turning their backs to submission and rejection both. They rewrite their narratives. They cut the strings of fate.

In the moors, Vanessa feels her whole conscious mind disengaging, decoupling from the rest of her, leaving only the body and the spirit to do their work. It has always been this way. She has tapped into this part of herself almost a dozen times throughout her life - sometimes by choice, sometimes by force - and always it felt less like an experience and more like a sensation. It is not a thing she does, it is a thing she feels: a dreamy awareness of descending, a distant sense of static roaring. It is not unlike the feeling of sinking into the velvet embrace of sleep, easing herself into tepid comfort.

She burns her remnants to the day, and she enters the night.

Hecate’s magic is dark and irrevocable – she binds Vanessa’s choice with her own blood, a bird’s broken wing, scorpion venom, and a thin chain of iron. The transformation is subtle but progressive. Vanessa no longer wears the sign of her faith around her neck. Silver tarnishes when she’s near, turning as dark and dull as coal. The blue-black shadows of night spill open their secrets, and her eyes seem to reflect all the sordid wisdom of their hidden, murky depths. Vanessa used to keep lavender in her pockets for luck; now she keeps wolfsbane.

Her face is lunar in its paleness, except for the hollows of her eyes, which are bruise-colored. Blue veins crawl beneath her skin, as if her arteries are filled with ink. Her eyes become the color of frost on a windowpane. Her hair is a black deep and dark enough to swallow all light. Vanessa is unmoved by the changes in her appearance. She has no need for mirrors or her own reflection, and her body has only ever been a cage for her spirit. If it reflects her truth now, then she loves her physical self only for its final authenticity: when she brushes her hair, the strands sing beneath the bristles, snatching at the darkness of the shadows around her, when she takes to the wild wetlands, she can feel the earth beneath her feet and how it shudders at the coldness of her touch, and when she holds her hands to the white moonlight, she marvels at the wonder of her paleness.

Ethan finds her beautiful. He wants more than ever to follow in her wake, to guard her steps. He does not think to remember her warmth. He does not pause long enough to mourn her transition, for he too has changed, has molded himself into a creature befitting her dark descent. He does not think about inspectors or fathers or slain siblings.

If she is falling, Vanessa does not feel pulled under. She feels the opposite - she feels feels lifted, as if some stone deep within her has finally been pushed and set into motion, its rolling, careening path knocking free all her unspoken desires. She is unbound.

It isn’t until much later that she will doubt how painlessly she slipped into the dark’s  embrace.

Not until she unravels her soul and becomes acquainted with the insidious scent of blood.

Not until she longs for a coldness inside of her, a perfect icy stillness - a chill capable of numbing all feelings, of freezing all thoughts.

 

 


End file.
